Deeplinks Blog posts about Privacy

A proposed new law in Sweden (voted on this week, after much delay) will, if passed, allow a secretive government agency ostensibly concerned with signals intelligence to install technology in twenty public hubs across the country. There it will be permitted to conduct a huge mass data-mining project, processing and analysing the telephony, emails, and web traffic of millions of innocent individuals. Allegedly these monitoring stations will be restricted to data passing across Sweden's borders with other countries for the purposes of monitoring terrorist activity: but there seems few judicial or technical safeguards to prevent domestic communications from being swept up in the dragnet. Sound familiar?

Here's a game you can play when reading or watching news about the President's warrantless wiretapping program. There are a few mistakes that the media keeps repeating over and over and over — see if you can spot them.

">Friday night's exchange on PBS News Hour between host Judy Woodruff and New York Times columnist David Brooks is typical:

Breaking with President Bush and GOP Congressional leadership, presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain said today through one of his representatives that he did not believe that Congress should immunize phone companies from liability for their participation in the NSA's warrantless wiretapping — at least not until Congress has held hearings to find out exactly what conduct was being immunized, and not until the phone companies admit to and apologize for their lawbreaking.

When a federal judge ordered Rep. Jim McDermott to pay House Minority Leader John A. Boehner and his attorneys more than $1 million in damages and legal fees for leaking an illegally taped phone call to the media, Boehner said he pursued the case because “no one — including members of Congress — is above the law.”

Why, then, is the Ohio Republican trying to squash similar lawsuits against telecommunications companies who cooperated with the government in warrantless electronic surveillance, ask the attorneys behind the class action suits.

A bipartisan group of senators sent a letter (pdf) to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III this week demanding answers about an illegitimate National Security Letter (NSL) served on the Internet Archive last fall. The Archive joined with EFF and the ACLU to fend off the NSL, which sought information about an Archive patron that the FBI had no authority to gather. After extensive negotiations, the FBI agreed last month to withdraw the letter and lift an accompanying gag order that had been imposed on the Archive, EFF, and ACLU.